Posted by
Hemos
on from the rolling-out-the-pretty-stuff dept.
Jonas writes, "I spotted that ATI has announced their next generation intentions where the 3D industry is concerned with their "Charisma Engine" and "Pixel Tapestry" technologies at this year's GDC. There's also an interesting article discussing the technology involved on their next gen 3D part. "
3D Texture mapping comments
by
Mithrandir
·
· Score: 3
Unfortunately, this article highlight's the author's shortcomings in understand what a lot of high-end 3D graphics is about and how it is implemented.
The one major thing the author misses about 3D texture maps is that rarely are they hand drawn by an illustrator. A typical map is a procedural texture (think of rendering a marble texture using POVRay) so generating a lump of marble is not that difficult a thing to do.
For games, the programmer just needs to fire up Povray, 3DS etc and get it to generate the appropriate texture volume and then put that in the image cache with the standard 2D versions. I'm sure a lot of game engines will handle this pretty quickly.
--
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
Charisma and Emotions explained.
by
doomy
·
· Score: 3
OTOH,
I feel that those two names come real close to describing these two very excellent egines as best describle on earth:) (this was before the destruction of earth by the vogons).
Lets see..
On Charisma, David Jenson wrote
When scientists and technicians hear the word charisma, they may first think of sales reps or politicians. But you'd be hard pressed to find a person in any influential biotechnology position who doesn't have some measure of charisma. Those on the scientific track are not exempt from this need.
Charisma is derived from the ancient Greek word kharis, meaning "to cause to strive or desire." The ability to motivate others to strive and succeed is a major building block of successful management, whether in a QC lab or in a corner office. Charismatic people describe goals by painting word pictures, thereby motivating others to a particular end. They have an exceptional ability to win the devotion and support of others. They have no fear of presenting their ideas to anyone who may be able to help them. And they have excellent persuasion and negotiation skills.
But more to the effect, I see charisma here derived from the Indian (as in South Asia) word. It too has a similar meaning to the regular charasmatic word. In this way, the word comes closer to a powerful healing force that is being ispearsed around the subject than anything else. This is a very visual word. A very charasmatic word. The word conjures a halo around it's subject and renders it in a light that leaves a very strong impression on anyone who hears it uttered. Thus, it is fitting a name for this chip (Which I believe would live up to this name). As would, the emotion engine in PlayStation 2. Which also conjures strong vibes and powerfully drawn meanings to the word and what the chip can do. Human emotions are powerful, machines, from the start of time (execpt for Marvin) are known to lack them. The very thought of a machine having these very emotions drive a very strong stab at anyone who looks at the PS2. The engine was made for it's artistic quality, it's ability to render something beautiful, so beautiful that it is almost real, that is the emotion, the charisma. --
-- ...free your source and the rest would follow...
Another article, plus ATI's Charisma White Paper
by
Guppy
·
· Score: 3
3dfx is actually a fraction of nVidia's size
by
Guppy
·
· Score: 3
Everybody likes to compare nVidia and 3dfx as the two top companies, but in reality 3dfx is a small fraction of nVidia's size. I don't have exact numbers offhand, but nVidia currently has about 45-50% of the graphics market while 3dfx has something like 10-15%, and I believe Matrox is even smaller than 3dfx.
Here's a comparision of some market caps (data from The Motley Fool).
ATI: 4,141.51 million S3: 1,607.80 million nVidia: 1,808.46 million TDFX: 218.09 million
Re:What happened to pixel volume rendering?
by
Junks+Jerzey
·
· Score: 3
Any game that uses OpenGL for more than a rasterization-only API automatically uses geometry acceleration on cards/drivers that support it.
Realistically, the boost is less than you may think. An average game doesn't spend more than 15% of a frame doing transformation. So the Ultra-Fast-Geometry-Accelerator-of-the-Future is going to buy you a 15% speedup in that case. The other issue is that geometry acceleration is only useful when you pump the data straight to the card and don't want or need intermediate results. For example, you'll have to transform points (one way or another) to do collision detection against instanced objects. But you can't use the geometry acceleration in that case, because the CPU needs the results.
Geometry acceleration is good, but it's not the panacea that many people are expecting it to be.
Re:time to rethink for intel/AMD/etcetc
by
Microlith
·
· Score: 3
That card's core is a highly specialized chip, focusing on the math for the transformation of points, lights, textures, blurs, and several things that don't involve most of the core of an x86 chip. Linux will never run on it unless they make one with a big flash rom, and a general purpose controller chip (read: i960 or other).
What kind of use is the card? LOTS! Go check out the Intergraph Intense3D Wildcat 4110. It runs in most prebuilt p2/p3 graphics workstations (huge card), and takes so much of the processing off of it, the only thing the cpus are needed for is getting the software started, and other extended math calculations (we love those fcurves!), and rendering of the final image. By the way, this card does everything the geforce AND v5 do... but i'm not sure as to it's fillrate, but 21fps in a scene with 80000 polys is impressive. And game cards are catching up quite quickly to the power of the "industrial card".
Acelleration... What needs to be done is the accelleration of the front side bus. It's just poking along at roughly 133mhz now, maybe 200 on athlon systems (but that's only ram to cpu). It'd be better if that were 1/1 with the cpu speed, or if it were faster, leaving the cpu with a wide open pipe to the ram and the other system peripherals.
Totally not answering the question....
by
luckykaa
·
· Score: 4
The 3d card market seems to have an alternative version of Moore's law:
Every 18 months, the number of people making 3D graphics cards halves. There's only about 6 companies making 3D chips now.
More features for no one to support
by
Junks+Jerzey
·
· Score: 5
Speaking as a game programmer, these advances are coming so fast that there's no time to concentrate on (1) pushing the limits of what a current generation of cards can do, and (2) dealing with card-specific features.
On the first point, there's not enough time to sit down and focus on where all the rendering time is going in a complex game. Well, more like there are so many card and driver combos out there that the best we can do is try to write generic code and have it work across the board. If we could focus on one card, say a Voodoo 2, then we could push the limits of that chipset out beyond what people only expect from a GeForce. But there's no time for that, so we plow ahead using about 50% of each card's capabilities for the three month window until the next card comes along.
On the second point, 3dfx, Nvidia, Matrox and ATI (and S3, and...) are all branching out into odd and card specific feature sets. 3dfx has their T-buffer. Nvidia has "8 lights per triangle hardware lighting." Matrox has a certain kind of hardware bump-mapping. ATI has all sorts of wacky stuff. The bottom line becomes "Do we want to just focus on writing a great game, or do we want to spend an extra six months of development so we can support special features of all these cards that were considered hot eight months ago when we were still pre-beta?" And tacking in special Matrox-only support, for example, is hell on QA. It makes a lot of sense to ignore such features, unless we're getting a bundle from the card company to cover us for the trouble.
Where next for high-end graphic cards?
by
tjwhaynes
·
· Score: 5
It seems that while the push for ever increasing image quality is going on, we are getting much closer to realistic, real time rendering of scenes. I wonder just what else is needed to really be able to push the envelope of visualization and realism further. Here's my current wish list.
Proper curved surface rendering - not just pushing the polygon count ever higher but actually rendering, for example, bezier patches with multi-pass textures.
Depth of field - most graphic cards today blur the insides of polygons when they are close (tri-linear mapping) but do nothing to blur the edges of the polygon, breaking the realism. And everything in the far field is in clean focus. Having real depth of field, so that there is some defined focal distance would help.
Integrated collision detection - we pass the cards all these vertex coordinates, fans and strips. It must be possible to pass some of the collision detection from the CPU to the graphics card. Using something like Orientated-bounding boxes at various detail levels and then passing the final collision detection to the card for some arbitration at the polygon level might help.
Integrated physics engine - gravity, flexion, distortion both plastic and elastic, hinges, rotation and friction. And anything else:-)
Volume rendering - either voxels per se or some iso-surface rendering based on potential fields.
There must be others - it looks like ATI is going to finally give us proper bump mapping and range-based fogging. Do we also need a proper chromatic model so that we can get rainbows through glass objects? Should there be real-time ray-casting or radiosity support so that real lighting effects (say carrying a flaming torch down a corridor and having proper soft-edged shadows) can be achieved?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
-- Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
The one major thing the author misses about 3D texture maps is that rarely are they hand drawn by an illustrator. A typical map is a procedural texture (think of rendering a marble texture using POVRay) so generating a lump of marble is not that difficult a thing to do.
For games, the programmer just needs to fire up Povray, 3DS etc and get it to generate the appropriate texture volume and then put that in the image cache with the standard 2D versions. I'm sure a lot of game engines will handle this pretty quickly.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
OTOH,
:) (this was before the destruction of earth by the vogons).
I feel that those two names come real close to describing these two very excellent egines as best describle on earth
Lets see..
On Charisma, David Jenson wrote
When scientists and technicians hear the word charisma, they may first think of sales reps or politicians. But you'd be hard pressed to
find a person in any influential biotechnology position who doesn't have some measure of charisma. Those on the scientific track are
not exempt from this need.
Charisma is derived from the ancient Greek word kharis, meaning "to cause to strive or desire." The ability to motivate others to strive
and succeed is a major building block of successful management, whether in a QC lab or in a corner office. Charismatic people
describe goals by painting word pictures, thereby motivating others to a particular end. They have an exceptional ability to win the
devotion and support of others. They have no fear of presenting their ideas to anyone who may be able to help them. And they have
excellent persuasion and negotiation skills.
But more to the effect, I see charisma here derived from the Indian (as in South Asia) word. It too has a similar meaning to the regular charasmatic word. In this way, the word comes closer to a powerful healing force that is being ispearsed around the subject than anything else. This is a very visual word. A very charasmatic word. The word conjures a halo around it's subject and renders it in a light that leaves a very strong impression on anyone who hears it uttered. Thus, it is fitting a name for this chip (Which I believe would live up to this name). As would, the emotion engine in PlayStation 2. Which also conjures strong vibes and powerfully drawn meanings to the word and what the chip can do. Human emotions are powerful, machines, from the start of time (execpt for Marvin) are known to lack them. The very thought of a machine having these very emotions drive a very strong stab at anyone who looks at the PS2. The engine was made for it's artistic quality, it's ability to render something beautiful, so beautiful that it is almost real, that is the emotion, the charisma.
--
HotHardware has another article on the R6 "Charisma", as well as a copy of ATI's White Paper.
Everybody likes to compare nVidia and 3dfx as the two top companies, but in reality 3dfx is a small fraction of nVidia's size. I don't have exact numbers offhand, but nVidia currently has about 45-50% of the graphics market while 3dfx has something like 10-15%, and I believe Matrox is even smaller than 3dfx.
Here's a comparision of some market caps (data from The Motley Fool).
ATI: 4,141.51 million
S3: 1,607.80 million
nVidia: 1,808.46 million
TDFX: 218.09 million
Any game that uses OpenGL for more than a rasterization-only API automatically uses geometry acceleration on cards/drivers that support it.
Realistically, the boost is less than you may think. An average game doesn't spend more than 15% of a frame doing transformation. So the Ultra-Fast-Geometry-Accelerator-of-the-Future is going to buy you a 15% speedup in that case. The other issue is that geometry acceleration is only useful when you pump the data straight to the card and don't want or need intermediate results. For example, you'll have to transform points (one way or another) to do collision detection against instanced objects. But you can't use the geometry acceleration in that case, because the CPU needs the results.
Geometry acceleration is good, but it's not the panacea that many people are expecting it to be.
That card's core is a highly specialized chip, focusing on the math for the transformation of points, lights, textures, blurs, and several things that don't involve most of the core of an x86 chip. Linux will never run on it unless they make one with a big flash rom, and a general purpose controller chip (read: i960 or other).
What kind of use is the card? LOTS! Go check out the Intergraph Intense3D Wildcat 4110. It runs in most prebuilt p2/p3 graphics workstations (huge card), and takes so much of the processing off of it, the only thing the cpus are needed for is getting the software started, and other extended math calculations (we love those fcurves!), and rendering of the final image. By the way, this card does everything the geforce AND v5 do... but i'm not sure as to it's fillrate, but 21fps in a scene with 80000 polys is impressive. And game cards are catching up quite quickly to the power of the "industrial card".
Acelleration... What needs to be done is the accelleration of the front side bus. It's just poking along at roughly 133mhz now, maybe 200 on athlon systems (but that's only ram to cpu). It'd be better if that were 1/1 with the cpu speed, or if it were faster, leaving the cpu with a wide open pipe to the ram and the other system peripherals.
The 3d card market seems to have an alternative version of Moore's law:
Every 18 months, the number of people making 3D graphics cards halves. There's only about 6 companies making 3D chips now.
Speaking as a game programmer, these advances are coming so fast that there's no time to concentrate on (1) pushing the limits of what a current generation of cards can do, and (2) dealing with card-specific features.
On the first point, there's not enough time to sit down and focus on where all the rendering time is going in a complex game. Well, more like there are so many card and driver combos out there that the best we can do is try to write generic code and have it work across the board. If we could focus on one card, say a Voodoo 2, then we could push the limits of that chipset out beyond what people only expect from a GeForce. But there's no time for that, so we plow ahead using about 50% of each card's capabilities for the three month window until the next card comes along.
On the second point, 3dfx, Nvidia, Matrox and ATI (and S3, and...) are all branching out into odd and card specific feature sets. 3dfx has their T-buffer. Nvidia has "8 lights per triangle hardware lighting." Matrox has a certain kind of hardware bump-mapping. ATI has all sorts of wacky stuff. The bottom line becomes "Do we want to just focus on writing a great game, or do we want to spend an extra six months of development so we can support special features of all these cards that were considered hot eight months ago when we were still pre-beta?" And tacking in special Matrox-only support, for example, is hell on QA. It makes a lot of sense to ignore such features, unless we're getting a bundle from the card company to cover us for the trouble.
It seems that while the push for ever increasing image quality is going on, we are getting much closer to realistic, real time rendering of scenes. I wonder just what else is needed to really be able to push the envelope of visualization and realism further. Here's my current wish list.
There must be others - it looks like ATI is going to finally give us proper bump mapping and range-based fogging. Do we also need a proper chromatic model so that we can get rainbows through glass objects? Should there be real-time ray-casting or radiosity support so that real lighting effects (say carrying a flaming torch down a corridor and having proper soft-edged shadows) can be achieved?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.